As police clear DC homeless encampments, AI videos distort reality

As part of President Donald Trump’s Washington, D.C., takeover, law enforcement agents are clearing out homeless encampments. News organizations and residents captured videos of officers pasting eviction notices on tents and using trash trucks to discard people’s belongings.

But some social media users seized on these real events to generate fake videos using artificial intelligence.

"Police moved in today to clear out a homeless camp in the city," a narrator said in an Aug. 16 TikTok video as sirens blare in the background.

"City crews tore down tents and packed up belongings and swept the park clean," another narrator said as the video continued. "Some protested. Some begged for more time. But the clean up went on. What was once a community is now just an empty field."

The post showed what appears to be footage of police gathering around tents, men in yellow vests sweeping trash bags and putting tents in a truck and a crowd of people protesting. 

Another Aug. 19 TikTok video showed a long tree-lined path littered with trash and tents and an official-looking building, possibly the White House or a monument, in the background. It appears to show hundreds of people including some in yellow vests cleaning the trash. 

"An encampment for the unhoused in Washington D.C. was cleared by employees of the city's Department of Health and Human Services," the video’s caption read. "The residents of the homeless encampment packed up their belongings and left with the help of city outreach workers, as well as non-profit employees and volunteers."

But neither video is real. They were both generated with artificial intelligence. Here’s how to tell. 

Look for watermarks or disclaimers that identify AI

Some AI-generated content includes watermarks or disclaimers. 

For example, the clips in the Aug. 16 TikTok post included a small watermark that read "Veo" on the bottom-right corner. Veo is Google’s AI video generator. The platform lets users create eight-second videos, which helps explain why the clips in the TikTok post are all shorter than that. 

The Aug. 19 TikTok video didn’t have a visible watermark. However, the post included a tag that said "creator labeled as AI-generated." TikTok’s guidelines "require creators to label all AI-generated content that contains realistic images, audio, and video."

(Screengrab from TikTok)

Look for visual inconsistencies

Despite how realistic AI-generated videos can be, they’re not perfect, and looking closely at the clips can frequently reveal visual inconsistencies. 

At the two-second mark in the Aug. 16 video, a woman holding a white trash bag appeared from behind police officers. In the same moment, a blur of another person walked through her before disappearing. After that, about six seconds into the video, a police officer took one of the woman’s trash bags as the other bag she was holding vanished. 

In another clip, a man in a yellow vest folded up a tent. As he turned toward the camera, a pole seemed to pass through his body, and the tent he was folding disappeared. 

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 (Screengrabs from TikTok)

Video of protesters showed people holding signs with illegible messaging and a woman whose hand looked blurry, with what looked like more than five fingers. The clip included captions with misspelled words and blurry letters.

(Screengrab from TikTok)

The Aug. 19 video also had inconsistencies. For example, a man in a yellow vest set down what looked like a sleeping bag. The sleeping bag morphed into a white plastic bag. Eventually, a person appeared from that bag. 

(Screengrabs from TikTok)

Additionally, the trees lining the path in the video had no leaves. Trump’s Washington, D.C. takeover started Aug. 11, in the middle of summer, when trees in the district have green leaves.

It’s unclear which government building is supposed to be represented in the background of the video. The White House, the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson memorial all have white columns similar to the ones in the video. But, in real life, none of those buildings has a dirt road lined by trees leading up to them.

TikTok videos claim to show police clearing out homeless encampments in Washington, D.C., but they were generated by AI. We rate them False.